Artist Bio

VOYAGE FROM THE HISTORY OF ART AND BACK
Irina Tchmyreva, PhD. Moscow, curator at MMOMA Moscow Museum of Modern Art

The Matthias Koester exhibition in Russia is a highly anticipated event; he is an artist who never fails to mention 20th century Russian Art as one of his main influences. Matthias Koester, student of Lupertz and Graubner, carries on the tradition of Expressionism, but he also integrates the experiences of the preceding generations in his art. Koester is considered an artist for whom art is the cornerstone of the creative process and of the projection of self. As in the Russian Avant-garde, he values the boundlessness of color and the rhythmic precision of the structures of Malevich (not to mention the vast potential of objectlessness). Contemporary Russian life - the uniqueness of its history alongside images of new Russia - provided beneficial source material for recent art in many countries. These contemporary myths do not escape Koester's attention. For him, the Russian “dream team” is the continuation of the dolce vita as portrayed by the great cinematographers of the mid 20th century: Fellini, Bu–uel and Ferreri. The elite youth of today, by copying the MTV lifestyle, by touching the visually-saturated Baroque, Art-house cinematography of the past through contemporary clip culture, actually becomes the subject of representation - not only of film, but also of contemporary painting.

It has become commonplace to talk of the diluted state of art history in contemporary visual culture. We swallow cultural history like a soluble solution in a cocktail of the trash of daily life, of nostalgia for the past and of the euphoric illusion of a wonderful future. Matthias Koester, talking about his painting, emphasizes the theme of cinema through childhood memories. He, a child of the sexual revolution and cinephilia, was familiarized with film through television (watching films which today we respectfully call 20th-century classics) at a young age. In this way, the visual Baroque vitality and the voyeurism of the screen were thrilling and gripping all the same. Koester began drawing in early childhood. Later he was a student at the Dusseldorf Art Academy, which for many years had been directed by Professor Markus Lupertz, whose recourse to cinema through painting took place at the peak of European cinephilia in the 1960s. Koester, having undergone studies in the heart of late 20th century artistic development, emerged as an artist at the end of the 1990s, having found his own imagery and his own materials.

Koester paints on aluminum. No, he does not like metal. But he values its properties. Koester says that working on a shiny surface in oils transforms painting into a process, comparable to fresco painting, of lightning brushwork: painting “alla prima”. Such a technique does not tolerate correction, but allows, once liberated through Automatism, the transposition onto the flat plane of the future picture of one's memories, a flow of images, deriving satisfaction from the process of painting itself; from the ring of color, the visible brushstrokes, patches of light on the surface of the aluminum. European painting in the 1990s has been called the epoch of the rapprochement of painting and photography (which had in fact begun long before that period). In such a speculative moment, the painting of Koester constitutes a step forward, a new stage. But just as photography and cinematography initially had a common nature, and a common optical production of images, so the painting of Koester becomes the continuation of the language and possibilities of both cinematography and photography. The pictures of Koester are a tribute to the shiny surface of the daguerreotype, more meaningful as an object than the image on it. Koester's paintings on aluminum work with light, with the light-radiating capability of materials, comparable with the Impressionists, who strove to convey a color-light impression. Koester, being neither a photographer nor an optics specialist, comes to an understanding of “enlightenment” in its photographic meanings, where the depth of the image creates, as a result of optical clarity, precision and the light-receptivity of materials.

For Koester, the surrealistic and the absurd form a starting point for the fusion of art historical moments. Koester breaks the laws of the art market, confirming the significance of not only the greats of art and film, but also of the less well-known creators of the preceding visual reality. He cites Warhol and Herzog, and Deneuve and Kinski as influences. But it is impossible to ignore the animators of the Bond film credit sequences and the creators of Manga Ð out of which Licthenstein and Baselitz have grown. Matthias Koester operates with contemporary life, incorporating into his works images appropriated from our saturated reality, from contemporary art, cinematography, calligraphy and graffiti.

The artists most closely associated with Koester in contemporary Russian art are paradoxically distant from each another: Dubosarskiy & Vinogradov, and Dmitriy Gutov. The virtuosity of drawing and painting bring Koester near to the first two. Gutov and Koester are both aware of the emptiness separating the image and the word and both assemble a new semantic construction of images, derived from the spheres of desire and consumption. Both use the sketch style of painting necessary for spontaneous transmission. It seems that the image, painted instantly like a snapshot, cleanses itself of its material cover and becomes the reflection of an idea.

Matthias Koester often uses a horizontal stretched format, typical for landscape. In his art this form becomes a tribute to the panoramic vision, lasting in time. His compositions express the perception of the participant of the journey through contemporary visual culture. Its jungles grow, feeding from various sources, swallowing both blood and art, great myths and the insignificant events of private life. Refined by Matthias Koester, they all return to contemporary life in pictures, aspiring to remain within the grand history of art. And no matter what we think about it, the history of art is merely gold dust on the surface of contemporary life.

Irina Tchmyreva, PhD.
Moscow Museum of Modern Art